Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Follow Me: The Humble Libertarian On Twitter

1. Breaking News Alerts- Earlier this month I delivered two different stories to you as they were breaking: The Binghamton, New York Shooting Massacre and the Somalian Pirate Hijacking. I don't know how many of you got these stories as they were breaking, but I imagine that far more of you check your Twitter account regularly throughout the day than you do this blog or your feedreader. My hope is to do with Twitter what I cannot effectively do with this website alone, and that is provide you with critical news alerts along with my commentary as the stories are breaking. Using Twitter as a resource, I hope to turn the Humble Libertarian brand into your source for quick, important news updates as well as the libertarian analysis of current events and policy you get here at the blog every day.

2. Live Tweeting- I am also excited about the possibility of "live tweeting" certain important events as they happen. For example, if President Obama gives an important speech and I'd like to cover it live, I can do so from Twitter and you can follow along and join in on the conversation with your live comments. The next time I cover an Obama speech, you can expect a steady, live stream of sarcasm, rebuttals, laughs, and probably utter dismay.

3. Subscription- Some of you may prefer to keep up with my blog updates through Twitter. That's just fine. I'm new to Twitter myself, but I know a lot of people use it more than e-mail these days and if you're one of those people, I want to provide this blog's content to you as conveniently as possible.

4. Featured Links- At the top of this page, I have a short section of featured articles that I have used to highlight previous articles on this blog and to direct your attention to great content on other websites that I considered noteworthy and entirely self-sufficient without any further commentary from me. Instead of cramming up your feedreader with constant post updates, this seemed the best way to share all the good content that I'm reading. Now, I can start using Twitter for the same purpose. I may or may not remove the featured articles from the top of this page. There seem to be a couple good reasons for and against. We'll see.

5. Networking and Promotion- I've heard that you can bring a lot of new traffic to your blog or website through the use of Twitter and I've been very conspicuously enthusiastic about my goal of vastly growing this community of liberty lovers and taking the world by storm! I'm excited to see how many new people- through my use of Twitter- will be exposed to the ideas on this blog and our particular style of presenting them, and who will keep coming back for more. I am also looking forward to networking with libertarians and learning from them. By following their tweets, I hope to get you news alerts even faster, I hope to direct you to even more and better content, and I hope to be able to gather good information to improve the quality of the research that drives The HumbleLibertarian's content. If I had Twitter at my disposal while gathering websites for my Top 100 Libertarian Websites List, I likely would have been able to sample libertarians' opinions more quickly and thoroughly and gotten a better list up the first time, instead of relying now on a series of regular revisions as I take comments and e-mails about the list.

So please get in on this great service and follow The HumbleLibertarian on Twitter. If you don't have a Twitter account, you totally need to get one. I was late getting on board with it, but it's value (no matter what your goals) is colossal, and I expect that the more I use it the more apparent that will become. I'm also working on how to integrate it into this website. For now, I have a flash widget at the bottom of the page under the posts. I'm considering putting it in the sidebar or replacing the Featured Articles section with it. I'm also considering not integrating it at all and just providing a link to my twitter page in the sidebar. If you have any suggestions or preferences, please let me know in the comments. Also, if you have any helpful tips for using Twitter as I'm new to it, those will be appreciated.